Toyota Stalls Out

Of all the stories of failure and retrenchment in business, finance, and the economy, the sudden woes of Toyota stand out in a curious way. It's not that Toyota, which has suspended manufacturing and sales of most of its models in the U.S. while it addresses serious safety problems with accelerator pedals, is going to steal the award for corporate drama from WorldCom, Enron, or Bernie Madoff. It's not even that its latest problems have come to light in the U.S. so suddenly, and that they are at odds with its decades-old reputation for reliability, although those aspects of the story do stand out.

The Toyota story is compelling because it has the power to challenge the way people look at the world. It makes us pause for a moment and reconsider the global economic script, in which the U.S. is always in decline, especially when it comes to manufacturing. It shows us that the hero of the story is human too. So much has been written about the rise of the Asian business sectors, first in Japan and now in China, that it's easy to forget that the potential for missteps is global, not just a regional weakness. Even as the banking and housing sectors in Japan crumbled, its manufacturers seemed to rise above the troubles. Now that part of Japan's economy seems vulnerable too.

Toyota is a truly great company, and it will doubtless recover from its setback. But when it does, there's a good chance that the global economic script may have changed a bit. It may be less black and white. GM has a strong new leader in CEO Ed Whitacre, who has paid off debts to the government, invested in new technology, and even salvaged a deal to sell Swedish division Saab to Dutch luxury carmaker Spyker. It is just possible that the rescue of the U.S. auto sector, led by President Obama, may work. It is just possible that the Big Three will take the opportunity to build cars that sell, reclaiming the momentum in their home market as Saab and Toyota look a bit more closely to their home markets.

Of course, there's no guarantee that the U.S. automakers and their rivals from abroad won't fall into the same roles they have held since the 1970s. But for the first time in a long while, a major revision to the script seems possible.